Is Cost Cutting Hurting your Customers?

22-10-2009

A friend recently sent me a humourous clip of a patient cutting down the cost of a tooth extraction by requesting that the dentist witholds all anaesthetics and other "non-essentials". The reason for the callers lack of concern becomes apparent when he states that the appointment is for his wife.

It immediately occured to me that this is exactly what a number of agencies (many whose names you may have seen thrown around Twitter like confetti) do when choosing a backend CMS provider for their client, though often with more painful results for the unknowing client.

Throughout web history, designers and backend providers have often struggled to see the value each party brings to a project with both players believing, usually in the back of their minds, that the role their teams play is key to the success of the project. Admittedly, before working with some of the excellent agencies I have dealt with over the last few years, I have felt like this myself.

From a client perspective the fact is that an ugly site running on a beautiful backend solution site is just that, an ugly site. In the same breath, a beautiful site offering limited, shaky functionality can be likened to a Mercedes without an engine, pretty damn useless.

Let's go Cheaper!

A few months ago I was involved in a joint venture pitch for an enterprise site with a relatively large budget. During the project costing phase with the design agency involved, we were listing our costs on a whiteboard to get to the total project cost.

After the design project manager had listed the design costs, I stepped forward and wrote our prepared development costs on the board. Immediately an awkward silence filled the room as the design team realised that the backend costs were overshadowing the design costs...by quite a chunk.I believe at this point no harm would have come from a tactful "I think we need to work together to get this within budget" but instead I was disappointed but not overly shocked to hear the design project manager say "we may need to look at using some cheaper backend for this."

Stopping there, I would like to explain, from a backend solution provider perspective why this is not always the route to follow if your agency has the best interests of your client at heart. I have also provided some questions to help you determine if you are making the right descision for your client.

4 Points to Consider when going Cheaper

Cheaper is often not better

In the same way the costs of a experienced, cutting edge design agency tends to be more pricey than a 18 year old kid working out of his parents garage so a solid, mature, enterprise backend solution tends to be more pricey than a CMS whipped up for an ex customer who needed to manage his site.

Does the solution fit

I recently cut down a massive tree in my garden using a small hand axe. The axe got the job done but because it was not designed for the task, it resulted in huge frustrations and cost, my hands were wrecked.

Use the right CMS for the right job. A basic CMS powering an enterprise site will just result in tears.

Support, support, support

Users are going to have questions, issues or changes to their system sooner or later and will need someone to provide some assistance. Generally this support needs to come from someone who knows and can fix the system.

Without a doubt the number one reason for most migrations to Realmdigital Platform from other systems is the need for "a person to talk to" when things go pear shaped. A majority of the open source and proprietary CMS available do not offer helpdesk support.

WWCS: What Would Client Say

In the shoes of the client, would the compromise of quality of solution over cost be acceptable?